What is it about?
The essay unpacks the uncanny effects of Conrad's Under Western Eyes - the weird repetitions evoked inside the text and outside it - in the life of Razumov the protagonist and Conrad the writer. The way in which Haldin interrupts Razumov's life, much like the way Dostoevsky interrupts Conrad's novel will be unpacked here to show how we might distinguish between the theoretical paradigms of influence (as in Harold Bloom's model) and intertextuality (as in Kristeva and Barthes). The novel will be read as a case of writer's block - Razumov's and Conrad's both - and the two theoretical paradigms will allow us to find two different answers to how we negotiate its frustrating effects.
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Why is it important?
It allows us to reread the novel not as a drama of guilt and betrayal but as a treatise on writing - on what to do with influence, control and uncanny repetition.
Perspectives
I was intrigued by Under Western from the first moment I encountered it in Prof. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's 20th Century novel course back in 1994. I felt I needed to negotiate Dostoevsky's haunting of the text - what this fact meant for Conrad, for writing and for the way we experience the novel. It is only when I finished writing this paper that I felt I could lay this question - and these ghosts - to rest.
Prof. Yael Levin
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Interruption of Writing: Uncanny Intertextuality in Under Western Eyes, January 2011, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789401207270_003.
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